Animation style guides for your favorite TV shows are extremely cool

The magic of animation has been somewhat simplified with the growing slate of software and hardware built specifically to beam anything you can draw or click to life with a mouse into a computer. Inside that computer, you can squish and stretch and texture and move in ways that used to take dozens, if not hundreds of drawings to accomplish in the traditional manner. There is one thing that remains constant between hand-drawing all your animation and using a computer to do it: you still have to draw the initial characters and world in the style of the animated piece.

For animated TV and movies, characters might be the collaborative creation of four or more people, so it’s important that they are all drawing the character the same way. You probably wouldn’t like watching The Simpsons so much if Bart looked a little different in every shot, so large animated productions create style guides.

For people not into the long process it takes to animate a TV show, a style guide can serve a couple other fun purposes. If you happen to get ahold of the style guides for your favorite show, it can give you insight into how the characters are expressing themselves. If you’re artistically inclined, it gives you the inside look on how your favorite characters are designed and allows you to draw those characters how any new hire animator on that show would. Each shot of each character is drawn multiple times from concept to finished product, and each artist along the way has to conform to the rules in the style guide.

The visual animation process begins with storyboards, the first rendering of the characters in the story, then it moves on to key poses in specific shots. The drawings that create the motion from key pose to key pose are “in between frames” and that’s the difficult work of animating that is often shipped overseas for cheap labor or fed into a computer.

Something like The Simpsons, whose episodes take months to produce after they’ve been fully voice recorded, has become more and more about consistency in the characters as the series moved from the style guides from the overseas animation era:

To the high definition era that required specific detail and could be mapped inside 3D software for special effects:

Something like Batman: The Animated Series is just as concerned with making a stylish program as they are with character consistency, so the style guides for that 1990s era animated show focus on how to draw Batman in a lot of dynamic poses and still get clean and simple line work.

Modern digital shows like Rick and Morty still need to fully design characters that can be referenced by third party animators who need to make them move in the background. Like the Cronenberg’d out town from “Rick Potion #9.”

Even simple looking designs like the leads in Rick and Morty have a series of rules that govern how simple they look and how the lines should be in relation to each other.

These shows are at base cartoons though, so some style guides spend as much time talking about the type of movement or character that needs to be portrayed in drawings more than the volume of the head or the shape of the ears.

Where as the style guide for Adventure Time allows anyone drawing Finn to occasionally break rules of the style guide itself (and physics) if it allows for a better animation on the character.

Style guides usually make it online after being distributed by the show itself in some sort of blog or in an “Art of” book. Occasionally, animators who worked on a show will let the style guide go after they conclude their work on it. It’s not a spoiler document or particularly important, but for fans of those shows or animation in general, they’re pretty neat.